Hey, everybody. We had a little bit of a scheduling snappoo this week,
and so we didn't get an episode recorded, and I wanted to make
sure that you all got one. So I am recording an episode. We
are going to be getting ahead here in a couple of weeks because I'm going
to Microsoft Connect and Microsoft likes to hook me up with all of the cool
people there, so hoping to get some really, really great stuff there.
But in the meantime, I thought, you know what, I'll jump in
and talk about something that I've been thinking about a lot lately that we don't
have an episode coming up on soon. So there are two things. One
of them is entrepreneurship, and we did get an episode scheduled for that in
December, which will probably come out in January. But the other thing that
I've been working on lately is a course on how to get a job.
And I've been talking about this for a while, but I finally actually got
things scheduled. So November sixth is when it starts, which is about a
week after this comes out. So if you're looking for a job or you
want to know how to kind of beef up your resume or see if there's
something better out there, this course will cover all that. I'm not going
to plug it too heavily beyond that, I just want to kind of get
that out there so that you know that it's out there, it's available.
I'll go ahead and give you the link as well. It is devchat,
dot TV, Slash, get dash, a Dash, coder Dash job Dash,
full Dash access and I'll probably come up with some way to shorten that
up and put a link to it in the show notes. But anyway,
if you're interested in the course, you can go check it out. What
I'm going to do here over the next half hour to an hour is I'm
basically just going to drop some of the big core pieces of the course.
Now, obviously I can't do the entire course because the entire course is eight
sessions which are two hours ish long each, So I can't give you everything
for free. I wish you could, but I can't, And this will
help kind of give you a flavor for what's out there. So let me
just jump in here and talk briefly about it. One of the things that
I hear a lot from people is essentially how do I get a great job?
And a lot of the people who are out there applying are essentially in
a position where they're saying, look, all the companies out there that I'm
talking to are looking for senior developers and they're not hiring junior folks. And
to be perfectly honest, when I talk to companies and I'm like, hey,
you know, are you hiring junior developers, the issue that they come
out with is well, not really, because either we wind up training them,
they leave, or the other thing that happens is is we've gotten such
a mixed bag with junior developers that we never know what we're going to wind
up with. So essentially, what you need is you need to have some
kind of reliability or selling point that you can give to these companies so that
they feel good about bringing you on. So either you're going to learn quickly,
you're going to stick around for a while. I hesitate a little bit
to tell people to make that kind of a commitment, but if you can,
you know, make a commitment to stick around for a year or so,
or hey, look, you know what if things go well over the
next few months, so I can make that kind of a commitment or something
like that, that does help. But the other thing is is that a
lot of the boot camps are churning people out. You've got people who are
self teaching, and yeah, they get innundated with all these new people and
it's really hard for them to know what these folks are capable of. Then
the other end of this or the other part of this problem is the people
who have been in programming for a year or two and they go out they
get that job, right, so they've been out there for a year,
and then they're applying around and it's the same kind of thing that they don't
have enough experience, et cetera, et cetera, and they don't really know
how to put themselves out there so that people will want to hire them,
and they don't know how to frame their experience so that people know what they're
capable of. And so we kind of walk through this process of getting everything
together so that you can show the companies that you're the kind of person they
want to hire. Now, I'm going to take a little bit of a
step back, because there are things that you can do to wind up in
a better position than you otherwise would. And I think a lot of people
really get hung up on well, I just want a better paying job,
or I just want a better job, or I don't want to work with
this boss anymore that I don't like, or something like that. And in
some cases that's helpful. In in other cases it's not. Generally. What
I tell people to do, and I actually have a worksheet for this is
I tell them to sit down and figure out what kind of job they want.
So some people they want a job where they can interact with smart people.
Other people want to just show up, sit down, don't bug me.
I'll get my code written. So you kind of need to know about
that if you've had a job or two in the past. The other thing
is is some people are like, I don't want an authoritarian boss, or
I don't want a boss that hovers. Other people want a boss that's involved.
So again, you know, you kind of work off of this definition
of what you want based on where you've been, so you know what kind
of people you want to work for, you know what kinds of problems you
want to solve. Unless you're really really new and you just haven't tried them
all, right, then in that case it's I want a job where I
can try out a lot of different things and figure out what I like.
You may already be able to do that with some of the boot camps and
other online learning systems that are out there, and sometimes it's a little bit
tricky to get there until you've actually worked in a job right and you figured
out, you know, I really really hate medical technology or I really really
love financial budgeting technology. So you'll figure out pretty fast, Okay, this
is the kind of area I want to work in. Some people, the
fulfillment they get out of their job is the fact that they feel like they're
making a difference. And I can tell you that at my first job out
of college, I was actually doing tech support there. I wasn't a programmer
there. Technically, I did wind up building the first pass along with one
or two other folks that I was working with at the system that they used
to do the tech support. So I did program there, but that wasn't
my job title. My job title was the guy that ran the tech support
department. That's what I did. And then I moved to QA and then
eventually got a job doing development another company. But one thing that I felt
really good about at that job was that I felt like we were making a
difference because the company did online backup, and we would hear back from people.
My computer died and I had a backup with Mosey, and I didn't
lose all my kids' photos or it saved me hundreds of dollars or thousands of
dollars or however much. Right, So I felt like I was making a
difference. And for some people that's it, and some people they have pretty
specific areas that they feel like they can make a difference in, and for
other people, all that really matters is that they're helping folks out. So
again, just kind of think through these things, think through what do I
want? What do I want out of this job. You can put a
number down for salary too. Some people that's a way they keep score.
Other people that's if I can pay for everything, right, if I don't
have to think about whether or not I can forward to blah blah blah for
my kids or my wife or myself, then I'm making enough. And for
other people it's I want to maximize salary because that's what matters to me.
Right, It's a scorekeeping game, and none of this is right or wrong.
It's just the way it is. So anyway, the worksheet will walk
you through a lot of this, But basically what it breaks down to is
who do you want to work for or who do you want to work with?
What kind of a job do you want? What kinds of things are
you going to do? Does the technology matter? What kind of technology you're
going to be working in? What's the working environment? Like? Are you
going to be in a desk in the middle of an open room, open
space? Can you not work under those conditions? You know, maybe you
work in a smaller room with your team or in your own office, and
can you reasonably expect that? Right, because if you're a junior developer,
you're probably not going to wind up in your own office. But then you've
also got the aspects of who you work with. Do you want to work
with a lot of really senior people? Do you want to work with a
lot of people? About it your level? Another person that you have to
deal with is your boss, So you know, is your boss hands on?
Hands off? You know, we talked about a lot of that stuff.
And again then the compensation and there's the salary, but also benefits,
right, how many days off do you want or need? What kind of
flexibility do you want or need? A lot of people take into account whether
or not they want to be remote, and so you've got a lot of
these different ideas around what this job is. So write them all down right.
You may not be able to find a place that does all of them,
but you may be able to find a place that hits most of them.
You may also be able to say, you know what, some of
these things are really really really important to me, and theyre kind of must
have things. And then there are other things on this list that aren't right.
So it'd be really nice to have a boss it's a little more hands
off. But when it comes right down to it, if the boss is
a little more hands on, I'm generally okay with that. But if I
have to work in an open cubicle farm or an open office layout where people
are walking up to me all day bugging me, I can't deal. Or
maybe you know what, I like the interactions. So if people are walking
by and we collaborate all day, that's cool. But if my boss comes
by too often, it's going to drive me insane. So you know,
you figure out which of these things are just critically important and optimize for those,
and then you can start doing some research as far as which companies meet
those criteria and things like that, And one thing that I found for a
lot of that is that if you can talk to employees that work at those
companies, you can figure out pretty fast whether or not they match up with
your criteria. One other thing to keep in mind with a lot of this
is that if you go on LinkedIn, so some people they want to work
in a certain geographic area or they want to work remote. So if you're
going to work remote, you can go to like WeWork, remotely dot com
or some of the other remote work websites and see what you can line up.
Remote is also a little bit easier sometimes to do as a freelancer,
so you may want to give that a try. But if you're looking at
a sacific geographic area, some of the best things that you can do are
go to the meetups in that area and meet people who work and live in
that area. So if you're already there, you can easily do that.
If you're not already there, I'll talk about that here in a second.
I go into a whole lot more detail on how to do that in the
course. But on the flip side, yeah, you do that. You
can also go on LinkedIn and you can do a search for companies that are
within a certain area, and I think it's usually by zip code is the
way that you do that. And so you just pick all the zip codes
that you're willing to work in, and you just work out of that and
it'll tell you what companies are there. And you can do a search for
say you want to work in JavaScript, you want to work in no JS
or Angular or React or View or any number of these other technologies out there
in JavaScript, you can actually search and a lot of these companies will have
people that have those things listed in their profile. And so you look at
the profile and you say, oh okay, John Doe works for ABC Company
and he does Angular, and so an ABC company is you know, close
enough to where I live, to where the commute is about what I want
it to be. That's usually what it boils down to. So then you
go and you find out more about ABC Company and see if they line up
with all the stuff that we talked about in that worksheet or in that process.
And as you do that, then what you start to find out is,
oh okay, ABC company builds widgets and they have an online shopping cart
and that's what their developers work on, and you know what, that kind
of lines up with where I want to be at, or maybe it doesn't
right, and so you cross them off the list, or you put them
a little lower on the list because they don't meet as many other criteria for
you. But let's say that ABC company actually lines up. Then what you
do is you start trying to figure out who the people who are making the
decision to hire are, because if you can do that, then essentially what
you can do is you can start showing them that you're the kind of person
they like to hire. You can get a lot of information about that off
of LinkedIn as well. You can also go to glassdoor dot com and a
few other companies because it'll give you an idea of who the people they've already
hired are and that gives you an idea of whether or not you fit in.
And so if they've hired people at about your experience level, then you're
in good shape. If they've hired people who seem to have a similar personality
or approach to coding or anything else, again you're in good shape because you
can go ahead and apply and it looks like they hire people that are like
you. One other thing that I'm just going to back up on because I
did say that I was going to talk about if you don't live in that
area, one of the things I encourage people to do if that's the case
is a look and see if the local groups have some kind of forum or
slack room or Google group, email lists, anything like that where they interact
online, because you can join in and interact online that way. So let's
say you live in Boston, you want to move to LA for whatever reason,
right, you have some family there or something, you have to move
because you have to go take care of your mother or something, or maybe
you've just always wanted to live in LA. I mean, whatever the reason,
right, So yes, you go. When you find the LA group,
you get involved in their slack chat, you get involved in their forum,
and you start helping out ask answering questions. You can ask questions of
your own. You can just get involved in the discussion in that way.
They'll have seen your name, they will have gotten involved that way, and
you can start to build relationships and rapport there and you can just let them
know, hey, look I'm looking at moving out to the La area,
and I'm excited about some of the opportunities there and I just wanted to get
involved in the local community before I made the move. Great. Perfect.
And then if you can make a trip out there, find out who the
companies and the people are out there, so the people who organize the users
groups, people who are hiring, people who work for the companies you want
to work for, and just get in touch with as many of them as
you can and just say, hey, look, I'm coming out for a
few days. It looks like you work for, work with, or know
something about the company that I want to apply to. Can we go grab
lunch? And that way you get that personal connection to these folks, even
if it's just a short trip. A lot of times you can also say,
look, I've looked at your company. I really thought it would be
worthwhile to work there, and I was wondering if I could just come in
and see the office, or if I could come in and meet some people
while I'm out there. And a lot of companies will let you do that,
I mean, unless they're just locked down as far as their security and
concern and anything else. That will open up a lot of opportunities and then
I mentioned the meetup organizers. The meetup organizers usually know most of the people
in the area and most of the people who showing up to the meetups.
They also usually have relationships with a lot of the companies that do hire people
out there, and so just getting to know them anyway will work to your
benefit. And if you can make it out there when they're actually having the
meetup, then you can take advantage of a lot of that work and you
can get that done. So, just to back up, what we've done
is we've identified the kind of job we want, where it's located, and
all of that stuff. We've started to apply that criteria to some of the
companies that we're looking at, so that we can start to get an idea
of what companies we want to apply to. Now, the next thing that
you want to do is build rapport with people who are trusted by the company
or work for the company. And what that does is then when you go
and apply to the company, when you send them your resume, then you
have somebody who can actually do some of the follow up or advocacy for you.
And you're not just some name on some paper in some pile of paper
that they're eventually going to get around to here's somebody that they're going you know,
they're going to be asked about, and they're going to have some kind
of social pressure applied to them about it, and that really really helps.
The other thing is is you can also then get the inside scoop. Right,
Oh, well they were trying to hire somebody, but we had a
big push for the trade show, and so they're putting it off for a
couple of weeks. Well, now you know, you know what, I
need to follow up in a couple of weeks, because following up now isn't
going to do a whole lot of good. And they didn't call me back.
And the reason they didn't call me back was wasn't because they weren't interested.
It was because they got busy. And so you can figure out some
of these timeframes. So the first week of the course, I'm talking about
just this general job search approach. The second week I would talk about resumes
and figuring out what this dream job is. And so we've talked about the
dream job, but what about resumes. I've sent out a few emails to
my mailing list, and if you want to get on the mailing list.
Just go to devchat dot tv. If you click on any of the shows,
it'll get you on the list because you can sign up to get the
episodes. So for JavaScript Jabber, for example, just go to JavaScript jabber
dot com and then just sign up to get the top ten episodes. Anyway,
So I've been sending these emails out and a lot of people make a
lot of mistakes on the resume. I think a lot of people are under
the impression that if they send a resume in that the resume is going to
get read. And that's just not the case generally when you get a bunch
of resumes, especially if you get more than like twenty or thirty. So
when I've done hiring, I've been in a position where I got like a
handful and then it's easy, right, I do read all those. I've
also been in a position where I got more than one hundred. I didn't
read them all. In fact, I didn't even skim them all. I
just went through them until I had enough candidates to fill up my schedule for
interviews and hope that one of them worked out. Right, So just keep
in mind that you want your resume to be something that they can immediately identify
somebody that they want to bring in for an interview. And so if you're
putting a lot of extra stuff on there, it's not going to help you.
And if you're not formatting it so that it's easily skimmable, then that's
also not going to help you. So let me talk about some of the
things that people do that they need to change. The first thing is is
that I've seen a number of resumes where essentially they have the name of the
job that they worked, so software developer at ABC Company, right, and
then underneath it's a paragraph that explains what they did. Well, paragraphs are
hard to skim, So what I tell people is to take the paragraph and
turn it into bullet points. So if you took the lead on some part
of the project, put that in there. Took the lead on building out
Joe. I was going to say geocashing, which is kind of a cool
thing but probably not something you're going to put in your resume. But geocoding
the coordinates for crime data. This is something I did in a past job.
I actually took the lead and moved us off of a service that we
were using to do it. You know, you can put in there.
If there are specific technologies you know you want to highlight, then you can
say you know that you implemented features in Angular or react or no JS or
whatever. If you're particularly good with a particular database, again you can say,
you know, helped manage Mango, tib or whatever. What that does
is it makes it really easy for them to say, oh, okay,
took the lead, so they'll actually take some initiative, get some of the
work done that I need, and they have experience with the technology that I
need them to know, and so you can start to really kind of frame
that out for people. The other thing is is if you have more than
three, four, five's pushing it bullet points per job, just keep in
mind that they're probably not going to pay too much attention to more than the
top three. So you want to have the big things that these companies care
about in your top three bullet points. And if you're applying to multiple companies
and they care about different things, then change the bullet points for the companies
you're applying to. And I get a lot of people and they're like,
can you do that? You know you don't just write your resume once.
No, you never write your resume. Just once you write your resume and
then you tailor it to each job, because essentially it's a sales letter to
that job. And so if I pour concrete, for example, I'm going
to change up my sales letter depending on whether somebody wants me to pour in
a walkway in their front yard, whether or not they want me to do
their entire driveway, it's going to be a different sales letter. And so
it's the same thing here, right, They're all looking for something a little
bit differ, and so you need to put all that together. A few
things not to put on the resume. I see people put in there,
like the objective their objective, and their objective is to work for a terrific
company that does X, Y and Z and P and D and Q.
And it doesn't help. Of course, your objective is to get hired,
and of course your objective is to work at a company that you're going to
like working for. So I mean, why bother, why take up the
space, use that space to put more information in. Another thing that people
put on the resumes that really doesn't necessarily help is references. Now, if
the company says that you have to have them on your resume. Put them
on your resume. But otherwise, if they need references, they'll ask for
them, So have them ready, you know, have them jotted down in
your pocket or on your iPhone or whatever. But otherwise don't put them on
the resume. It's a waste of space. And then you know you're going
to have your work experience. Some people ask me about volunteer experience and it's
kind of an iffy thing for me. Right, So this goes back to
doing the research on the company and on the person involved in doing the hiring.
So for example, if I found out that I was applying for a
job and the person that I was going to be that was going to make
this decision was somebody that really really really loved boy Scouts, like Boy Scouts
of America Boy Scouts, Well, I'm fairly involved in the organization myself,
so I will definitely put that on the resume. Or if they've always wanted
to travel to Italy while I lived in Italy for two years, so I'll
put my volunteer experience in Italy for two years, right, you know,
So if I know some of these things that I can put them on and
it makes it so that I'm there's something for them to want to talk to
me about. But you know, if you're just putting in you know,
I work on a soup kitchen, and I do these other things. If
you have space on your resume, put them on there. But otherwise,
if there's something else other relevant work experience or open source projects or anything else
that you've worked on that is going to lend more credibility to your skills as
opposed to your personality or I'm a good person, miss, I don't know
what the word is philanthropy, I guess put that stuff on there instead.
And so your resume is essentially then just a breakdown of what you've accomplished and
what you've done. Now, some people are like brand new, right,
they still have bubble wrap on them, you know, program umber bubble wrap.
They just came out of a boot camp, they just finished con Academy
or something, or Code Academy or some of these other ones that are out
there, and they don't have a whole lot of experience to put on there.
Right, We'll put your past work experience anyway, especially if it's either
in a relevant related area. So some people, for example, have been
nurses or accountants, or a friend of mine's going through a local boot camp
and he's actually been a marketer in the past. So if he was applying
to marketing companies or email companies or you know, something like that, where
he has relevant subject matter experience, even though he doesn't have relevant programming experience,
you definitely want that on there. I don't know if it's necessarily helpful
to put McDonald's on there, but I mean, if you have nothing else,
put it on there, because at least it shows that you have had
a job, that you've worked in some area. But what you're going to
need to do is you're going to need to find some other way to show
them that you are a capable programmer. So one of the other things is
you can put under other experience. You can put like the Capstone project for
your boot camp, or you can put in your side projects. Right,
I built budgeting software that me and my mom use, or you know,
whatever whatever it is, you know, you put that in there. You
know, I built out a shopping cart, or I implemented you know,
an open source system. You know when I set it up. You know,
those kinds of things will help you out. Another thing you can do
is go and contribute to documentation on open source projects. If if you can't
either get in the door to contribute code, or you're not comfortable yet contributing
code, then you can go contribute to the documentation and they will usually not
always, but they will usually count you as a contributor to the project.
And so then you can put on there I'm a contributor to the following open
source projects. And if there are projects that these folks have heard about or
can go Google and be a little bit impressed by it, that really helps.
And you don't have to have like mega programming chops to do it.
So a lot of those things will fill fill out your resume as well.
One other thing to put in there is I mentioned McDonald's may or may not
help you. One other thing that will help you is if you've moved up
within McDonald's right. So, and I'm using McDonald's as an example just because
it's a fast food situation where you know, people kind of think of it
as the bottom of the barrel job, right or your first job or whatever.
You know, I've seen subway on people's resumes and stuff before. But
if you can show that you move up from say cashier to assystem manager or
a shift manager or something like that, you know, or head of the
kitchen back end kitchen staff. It's been a long time since I worked at
McDonald's, I don't remember what all the positions are called. But if you
can put any of that in there, that also helps because it shows,
you know what, this person worked there for a few months and they figured
out that they could count on them to be a leader in the organization.
Leadership always looks good on a resume, so any of that will help as
well, and maybe some of your volunteer experience will play to that as well.
But anyway, the more of that that you can put in there,
it gives them an idea that, you know what, they may not be
an expert coder, but they're responsible, resourceful enough person to pull the trigger
on a lot of this stuff. So then what we do is we look
at the resume. But there's another piece to this, and this is a
piece that a lot of people forget and depending on your experience and who you
know. Because the last few jobs that I got that were full time jobs,
I got them through people I knew, and so I didn't need a
cover letter but a lot of people forget to put the cover letter on.
And the cover letter is the rest of it. Right, So your resume
is, here's what I've done, Here's what I've worked on, Here's where
I've volunteered, you know, all that kind of stuff, But it doesn't
really tell them what kind of person you are. And most companies, when
I talk to hiring managers, they basically say that the kind of person somebody
is accounts for more than their technical chops. Right, as long as they
can contribute in a meaningful way, you know, even if they're not the
top notch developer, if they'll learn quickly and they're a pleasure to work with,
they'll hire that person above the technical genius pretty much every time, because
nobody wants to work with the real, big fat jerk, even if they
are just amazing coders. And the reason is is because everybody else's code has
to touch theirs, and it's no fun to talk to somebody who's going to
talk down to you or treat you poorly. And so what you do is
you put in your cover letter the kinds of things that you can't really put
in the resume, Like you can't really put in the resume, I'm a
nice person, or I get along well with other people. You can put
in things that kind of indicate that, you know, worked with three other
developers to pull together a brown bag lunch program or something like that. Right
where it's hey, look, I wanted to do some learning. I brought
some other people together. I took the lead on this stuff. You know,
they didn't want to kill me at the end of it. So you
know, everything's good. But if you put something together, if you put
something like that in the cover letter, then what you essentially are telling them
is a here's why I want to work with your company. So this goes
back to that dream job profile that we talked about a minute ago. You
know what, as I thought about doing this job search, I realized that
I wanted to work at a company that XYZ and I found that ABC Company
does X and Y, and you're well on your way to Z and so
I have felt, you know, I'm excited for the opportunities that I have
to come work for your company, et cetera, et cetera. Right,
and then the next thing you do is you can say, from what I
can tell, it appears the ABC company hires people with the following qualities,
and I feel I exemplify those and that I have done things that exhibit that
in the following ways. And so then you can talk about some of the
initiatives that you've been a part of and some of the things that you really
like and you know, and it doesn't have to be in the programming field
at all, but then you can talk about church service or scouting service,
or you know, anything else you're involved in toast Masters, right, and
you can say, it looks like communication is key to this organization, and
you know it's important to me as well. I have my competent communicator from
toast Masters. You know, whatever you're going to put in there, But
what it does is it gives you that opportunity to say, you know,
I'm responsible, or I'm a good communicator, or I work well with others,
or I'm a a good leader, or whatever those qualities are that you
want to sort of highlight. You put those into the cover letter, and
what that does is it gives them the opportunity then to read through it and
say, this is the experience that this person has, this is what we
would be buying essentially, and that's on the resume and then this is the
kind of person that we're looking at hiring, and these are the qualities that
we would be paying them to have. And so it all pays off just
because you're able to give them that full picture and they can say this is
the kind of person I want to work with. Their resume isn't super deep,
but you know what, I like them enough to at least bring them
in and see what they've got, right, So then you could show up
and you can do the interviewing practices and things like that and at least get
some notice that way. And I know people who have gotten interviews off of
their cover letter even though they didn't have a whole lot in the resume that
was super relevant the company. So yeah, just keep that in mind.
That is definitely some movement there. So that's kind of the first two weeks
that we dive into there, and I give a lot more examples and we
do some resumic critiques and things like that. But yeah, so then the
next part is just researching the companies, right, And we talked about LinkedIn,
we talked about meetups, and the two weeks after that, the first
two weeks in December, we're going to be talking about getting noticed anyway,
and so all of these things kind of go together. It's getting information about
the company that the company puts out there through social media, through LinkedIn,
through Glassdoor, through whatever else, as well as people who have worked with
them. Right. Glassdoor allows people to anonymously post their experience working for a
company, so you can see if somebody's had problems working at that company,
because again it's anonymous, you can get an idea what the salaries are at
the company looking at that. You can look at some of the people in
the company by going to LinkedIn, looking at their page and then clicking through
to where people are actually at right, you can go look at the profiles
of their employees and get an idea of what's going on there. You can
also then in a lot of cases reach out to them right so you can
send them a connection request, or if you have a premium account, you
can send them an in mail in LinkedIn. The other thing is is that
in some cases it's really not that hard to figure out what somebody's email address
is, or you can also see if you're connected to somebody that they're connected
to, and then see if you can make a connection that way, and
so you email your friend and you say, Hi, friend, I'm looking
into getting hired at ABC Company. And I see that you're connected with Joe
Blow who works over at ABC Company, and so I'm wondering if there's any
way that you can introduce us so I can ask them a few questions.
And then you go out and get noticed. And there are a lot of
ways to get noticed. So I've kind of broken this down into two areas.
One is getting noticed from the outside essentially, so you're not interacting directly
with the company and you're not really becoming an insider on the company. You're
just getting to know the people that are making the decisions in the company.
So one of those ways is by going to users groups. And I tell
people to do this all the time. So you go to the users group
and you get involved there, and a lot of times you can tell from
LinkedIn or Twitter or somebody else's profile, you know what they're tweeting about.
Hey, you know they they organize this meetup or they go to this meetup
every month. Right, Hey, I'm off to the Utah Ruby users group
or the Utah JavaScript meetup and hey, you know or that was a great
talk by so and so at the meetup, and so you can kind of
get an idea, Oh, if I want to meet this person, I'm
going to go over there and meet them. Or you can also just show
up and talk to people who are talking about relevant stuff to what you want
to work on, and then you can kind of oh, so where do
you work, what do you do and get an idea, Oh, well,
they work for I keep saying ABC company, but they work for DF
company. I considered them, so I'm going to talk to them and find
out if DEF company matches up with what I think I want, and then
start talking to them about what it takes to get hired. The other end
of this is getting noticed from the inside. So I mentioned meetups, but
there are all kinds of other ways you can do this. You know,
the forums and chats also help. Speaking at conferences another way to do this.
I go into a lot more detail about these, but you know,
I only have an hour, so I'm going to try and move on,
because there's a lot more to this than just these things. Getting noticed from
the inside usually consists of a little bit more sort of the things that they
put out there in public. So if they have an API. You know,
you can write a library around their API that makes it easy to connect
to things from no Jazz or from Angular or from something else. You can
also if they have some sort of plugin system. So the example that I
use in a lot of these is in Structure. And Instructure is a company
that's based out of Salt Lake City and they have a product called Canvas,
and Canvas is a learning management system that colleges and other folks use to manage
their courses. So they have a plugin system and it sucks, but it's
there, right, And so if you wanted to get hired and Instructure,
one of the things you could conceivably do is actually right plug in for Instructure
Canvas. Now, it's not their fault that their plugin system sucks, because
they went with a standard system that other open source learning management systems used to
do plug in, So it's not ideal, but it works, right.
They also have APIs that are available for some of the things there, So
you know, if you built some kind of automation system or payment system that
hooked into Instructure Canvas, you know, you could do that, and then
you can basically present to the company and say, hey, look, I
really like your and I wrote this plug in, or I really like your
product, and I wrote this API integration, or I really like your product,
and so I wrote this add on software that connects to it somehow.
And so by doing that, you can sort of become an insider, because
then what you're doing is you're talking to their staff members about what you've built,
not necessarily because you're talking to them about getting a job, because they're
almost always interested in talking to people who are building software against their stuff,
and they're almost always interested in the ecosystem around their stuff, And so by
opening that up and opening those doors, you can sort of become an insider
another way. Instructure also puts on in Structure Con, which is a conference
based around their products. A lot of other companies do this. Twilio does
this, New Relic does this, Google does it Google Io, Amazon does
it with Reinvent. Microsoft has a handful of conferences that they put on,
so you kind of get the idea, right, I went to vm World.
VMware puts on a conference, and you kind of get the insider status
that way too. One that kind of blends some of this is blogging and
podcasting. So if you do a guest post from somebody from the company.
You're kind of bridging that because you know, you're putting out content about their
stuff, which is outsider stuff, but you're also bringing in their their staff
to write blog posts, so that's insider stuff. Having their staff members come
onto your podcast is insider stuff. So you're kind of getting the idea right.
I mean, anything you can do to interact with them, it really
puts you on their game. And then if somebody in the company knows who
you are, then when you actually do want to apply, you can reach
out to them and say, hey, look I'm looking for a job,
or hey, look i'd really like to work for def company. And you
know, it looks like you're doing a lot of interesting stuff there. I've
had so and so and such and such on the podcast, and you reach
out to so and so and so and such as well let them know you're
applying, and then you know your set right because then they can say,
okay, well I'll make sure that my boss sees it, or you know,
oh, I'll check in in a little bit. And then you follow
up with them and you're like, hey, you know, I sent in
my resume. A couple of weeks ago and I never heard back. You
know, I was just wondering what the deal is. And you would be
surprised at how many companies will call you back because you followed up. You
know, they got busy. It wasn't because there was something wrong with your
resume. They just got busy. And so by having somebody bring it front
and center, you can get that done. Of course, all of this
just leads up to getting the interview right. Once you go in for the
interview, you shake hands and talk to somebody face to face, it kind
of is a different story, and so you show up. I mean I
could spend hours talking about coding interviews, and a lot of companies do it
differently, but essentially, what you want to come across as is again somebody
who can do the work and somebody who they would like to work with.
And so if you can come across as both of those things, and usually
what this boils down to is being confident, just being yourself and really trying
to enjoy getting to know the person who's interviewing you. Yeah, a lot
of that works out. The other thing to keep in mind too, is,
especially for new people, they feel like they really have to demonstrate that
they know a lot of stuff, and it turns out that you really don't
have to do that. So demonstrating you know a lot of stuff, sometimes
it helps, and sometimes what it winds up doing is you'll talk about something
that you don't really know about and your interviewer does. And if you try
and bs your way through an interview, in a lot of cases, it'll
hurt you more than it helps you. And so you're much better off just
letting them know where you're at. And then what happens is is I've seen
a few companies they hired a whole bunch of people who were qualified for what
they were looking for, and they hired and they interviewed a bunch of peop
people who weren't quite qualified for what they were looking for. And what they
wound up doing is they wound up hiring one of the people that weren't wasn't
quite qualified. And the reason is is because all of the qualified people wanted
too much money or just didn't quite have what they were looking for, and
the person who didn't quite have all of the experience they wanted, it turned
out that they felt like they could train them in a reasonable amount of time
and make it work. So anyway, just something to think about you.
So just be yourself, let them buy what they're buying, and hire what
they're hiring, and it'll all work out once you get through the interview.
And there are all kinds of coding exercises. You'll probably hear nightmare stories about
coding on a whiteboard and stuff like that. Some companies do it, some
companies don't. Some of this information you can get off of glass door or
LinkedIn, and some of it you just won't know until your show, So
just keep that in mind as well. But anyway, it's kind of where
things are at, So find out as much as you can before the interview.
Go in prepared, be yourself, be confident, and hopefully you get
hired once you get Once that's all done, you get a job offer.
Now a lot of people will just take the job offer. It's what I
wanted. I don't want to rock the boat. Most companies actually will expect
you to try and negotiate, and so just keep that in mind. There's
a terrific book by Josh Dudy called I don't remember exactly what it is.
I'll put a link to it in the show. Notes, but he talks
about oh, it's expert salary negotiation and so yeah, so it's negotiating the
salary, right, and so you try and maximize your salary, maybe get
a few more days time off. You know, you can make trade offs
too, right, So maybe you don't care as much about the health benefits
because you're young or healthy or whatever. Right, and just keep that in
mind, right, that you can negotiate. So if you're willing to give
up a little bit of salary to get a little more time off for a
little more flexibility or things like that, you know you can do that as
well. And then the final thing is is that a lot of people are
also concerned. Okay, well, what if I don't have all the qualifications
for the company I want to work for? And so then we dig into
how to become a better programmer? What should I be learning, how do
I learn it, how do I demonstrate that I know it? Et cetera,
et cetera, And we dig into all that stuff too. So I
mean that's basically I mean I didn't just give you a rundown of the course.
I feel like I really gave you some quality tips and tricks and there's
a ton more that I've got. I just don't have time to go into
for this kind of a thing. So if you're interested in it once again,
you know, I'll just put a link in the show notes. But
it's devchat, dot tv, slash get a coder job, full access and
you'll hit a landing page and you can just scroll down and see what all
the details are. And yeah, anyway, so I'm gonna go ahead and
wrap this up. You know what, I should do some picks, but
I've just been talking a lot and i don't know that I'm really gonna do
picks today. So yeah, go check that out. Let me know if
you have any questions, because I'm happy to answer them, and yeah,
we'll catch you all next week.